I consider all those pop-ups to be illegal. The use case in my opinion does not warrant pissing off users by distracting them via such pop-ups. Here I classify slide-ins the same as pop-ups. I don't even read what is written there since I already don't care. I kind of have to use extensions to workaround this spam. The EU bureaucrats are very confused here - they cost a lot of money and don't really improve much at all. Plus, when they hand over data to the USA from EU citizens, it already puts them at logical odds - either you are consistent in what you do, or you simply shouldn't act in an orthogonal manner that degrades the user experience via laws. That's just nonsensical.
Most websites don't need cookie consent banners
21–30 of 103 posts
Re: Most websites don't need cookie consent banners
#22I wonder how many people provide consent through these banners. Is it frequent enough to be worth the terrible user experience? I know some sites use dark patterns in their cookie banners, which I consider to be a helpful hint that the company doesn't respect the users.
Considering that for most banners the "consent" is the easy option I assume a lot. People want to get rid of the banners. However I claim the point of the bad UX is to make users angry and then have them complain about EU etc. "demanding" those. In order to weaken the regulation of tracking. If they are successful (and they are making progress) "no more cookie banners" is a lot better headlines than "more tracking"
Those are technically in violation of the GDPR since the opt out is required to be just as easy as the opt in.
Re: Most websites don't need cookie consent banners
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
I appreciate the list of reasons to cookies are useful. Despite having worked in technology for 25 years, I couldn't have articulated that list off the top of my head. I have never worked for a website that made money that way. I think that means not ALL websites need invasive tracking.
can you give examples of serious online businesses that are not doing those things? Here are the industries that I've worked in that all did behavioral tracking for the above applications * gaming * music industry * healthcare * social media * news * internet search * online retail
You don't seem to understand that one can do behavioral tracking without sharing all personal data with Facebook and Google. GDPR is mainly focused on who you share the data with. Performance tracking of core business processess including traffic sources can be done without involvement of Facebook and Google.
It's totally legit to spend a career helping the folks at Facebook and Google to soak up more private information about everyone so the Trump campaign can improve targeting of the fake news advertisements for the presidential election campaigns. But it is not ethical.
Re: Most websites don't need cookie consent banners
#24Cookie consent banners make me immediately think if I should just leave the site and not care about the content.
Re: Most websites don't need cookie consent banners
#25Re: Most websites don't need cookie consent banners
#26Disclaimer: I work on a consent product.
If you're in any way something beyond a hobbyist, you should probably get legal advice about whether you need to get affirmative or implicit consent, whether you need to handle universal opt-out signals (in California, Global Privacy Control signals are now legally required to be respected), etc.
Simply saying "oh I'm only tracking local cookies" might not even be enough in GDPR because the act of writing any cookie is actually covered under the law (because you're storing something on the user's computer). You're required to disclose that these cookies are in use.
And a proper consent banner will immediately handle your GPC signal, and generally not show you anything (California now requires a visual notification that your preference has been respected).
I understand what the author is actually saying: you can design sites that don't require the tracking tools requiring consent. And yes, while true at a certain (small) scale, when you have hundreds of millions or billions of page loads per month, and several development teams, a partnership group, and a lot of moving parts, you'll forgive me for thinking this is impractical.
Consent banners don't have to be awful, I promise.
Re: Most websites don't need cookie consent banners
#27"You DON’T need consent for: First-party cookies used just for your own analytics (in most cases)" They claim that, but the page they link to as the source says "You must...Receive users’ consent before you use any cookies except strictly necessary cookies.". So what exactly makes them think that first-party analytics cookies are "strictly necessary"? The Mastodon link in the at the start of page doesn't seem to work…
Exactly. Analytics is one of the types of data for which permission is explicitly required.
Session auth cookies are the only ones the EU considers strictly necessary.
Re: Most websites don't need cookie consent banners
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
> the heuristic for whether you need the banner is essentially: is the user deriving the benefit, or just the operator? This is just as bogus as the user vs developer distinction in copyleft world. Of course users benefit from the operator knowing if their design decisions are actually on the right track.
how does the user browsing the site right now benefit from activity tracking? the specific user right now, not a hypothetical user at some point in the future (if the business continues to exist) answer: they don't
They need to tell themselves that "data privacy" is a non-issue because otherwise they would have to take responsibility for feeding Facebook/Google all of their users for many years, which directly resulted in fake news laced political advertisements which micro-targeted voters in the presidential elections.
The book "careless people" clearly documents how Facebook engineers were embedded in the Trump campaign to run fake news advertisements micro-targeted to US voters.
It takes a lot of strength to resolve such a fundamental cognitive dissonance, especially if your self image is the talented techie who made money without hurting anyone.
Re: Most websites don't need cookie consent banners
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
Considering that for most banners the "consent" is the easy option I assume a lot. People want to get rid of the banners. However I claim the point of the bad UX is to make users angry and then have them complain about EU etc. "demanding" those. In order to weaken the regulation of tracking. If they are successful (and they are making progress) "no more cookie banners" is a lot better headlines than "more tracking"
Those are technically in violation of the GDPR since the opt out is required to be just as easy as the opt in.
No, they're directly in violation. This is fully settled; it's just that some companies are counting on it not being "the thing that gets an enforcement action".
Re: Most websites don't need cookie consent banners
#30The way not to need cookie consent banners is to not do analytics tracking in the first place.
I often wonder what value it actually is. Sure, you might understand your demographics better.. if you presume that the analytics are faultless at telling you this- which they're really not. If you care about how your site is used, you don't need to set any cookies.
For my company, being able to view the user journey throughout the site in the analytics is pretty valuable.
We don't care who the specific users are - but the tracking gives us an idea of how many people use the site? do they have a good experience? are they giving us money? do we have a bug somewhere we're missing? etc.
All that is valuable as a business.